Perfumes are expensive and may be less effective when employed at high levels in compositions such as personal care compositions, cleaning compositions, and fabric care compositions. As a result, there is a desire to maximize the effectiveness of perfumes. One manner of achieving such objective is to improve the delivery efficiencies of the perfume. Unfortunately, it is difficult to improve the delivery efficiencies of perfumes as they may be lost due to their physical or chemical characteristics, they may be incompatible with other compositional components or the situs that is treated, or they may be lost during post application processes such as rinsing or drying.
One method of improving the delivery efficiency of perfumes is to encapsulate them so that the perfume is only released, for example by fracturing the shell of the encapsulate, when the benefit agent is desired. However, current encapsulated perfumes that are encapsulated by polyamides leak perfume over time and current encapsulated perfumes, in general, do not fracture and release the perfume when desired—particularly in hard surface treatment applications. In short, current polyamide-based encapsulates do not provide the required delivery efficiency as they do not deliver perfume in quantity or at the time desired.
Accordingly, there is a need for a polyamide encapsulate that provides improved perfume delivery. Here, Applicants recognized that the source of the leakage problem and delivery timing was that previous polyamide encapsulates shells were not sufficiently compact. While not being bound by theory, Applicants believe that the aforementioned lack of compaction is due to the use of only one water miscible monomer and one water immiscible, organic monomer in the current art polyamide encapsulates and the manner in which such monomers are processed to form such encapsulates. Furthermore, Applicants recognized that size and selection of the monomers used to construct the encapsulates shell is important in obtaining the necessary packing density of the shell. While not being bound by theory, applicants believe that the encapsulates that are disclosed herein have the correct packing density and thus meet the aforementioned need as such encapsulates are tailored such that they have the desired leakage profile and release profile.